I’ve been shooting for a while now down by the Palazzo. It’s really become one of my favorite places to shoot when just taking random photos for no other reason other than, it’s just what I like to do!
What I like about this location is that it’s not to hard to take a shot that doesn’t look like you’re in Vegas. They did a great job at creating more of a European feel to that area. Beautiful!
Old Favorites!
Because of the title of this post, I’ll tell you a couple of my other favorites involved in these shots…. Of course my ever-lovable 5D Mark II and my favorite lens, 50mm f1.2 L. This always guarantees I’ll have fun when just shooting for no reason. I’ll take shots just to test the shallow DOF this combination produces. And the color!
New Favorite!
Just upgraded to NIK Color Efex 4.0. Huge improvement over 3.0. If you’re on the fence about this one, just do it! You’ll be happy you did. My friend, Garrett Winslow tried to tell me to upgrade a few weeks ago when 4.0 first dropped. But I figured I had 3.0 and didn’t feel compelled to upgrade. I was wrong. 🙂
My favorite things in 4.0 are…
- the fact that you can add multiple filters in one session. In 3.0 you had to launch the plugin, add a filter, save it, then launch again, add another filter, save it, etc… This new feature makes it so much more powerful. You can add multiple filters and go back and forth between them, tweaking each one.
- A couple new powerful filters that really produce some pretty dynamic effects: Tonal Contrast and Detail Extrator. It makes it easy to achieve an HDR type of effect, which I’m normally not all that crazy about, but you can bring it back a bit to really create some dramatic photos.
The Shots!
Here are some shots produced using my favorites. Click to view the full larger version!
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